Robert Mullins: Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Foundation

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity that aims to promote the study of computer science and electronics at the school level.

The Challenge

We believe that everyone can benefit from a solid foundation in computer science as they do from one in mathematics. The skills it provides are becoming increasingly important to our economy as computer systems are used to enhance an ever wider range of human endeavours.

Computer science describes how computers work, how they may be programmed and even helps determine how hard a problem will be to answer. This is in stark contrast to ICT or IT skills that simply teach how to use computers and their applications. Unfortunately, many young people are only ever exposed to ICT courses rather than the much broader, richer and exciting world of computing. The ability to write even simple programs is a powerful tool for helping solve difficult problems or for just having fun! Of course, thinking like a computer scientist also means more than being able to program. Designing algorithms, using abstraction and decomposition to tackle large problems, selecting appropriate representations, learning how to build correct, robust and scalable systems are now key skills in the information age.

The Computing at School working group describe the challenges faced at school in this area.

The Raspberry Pi Computer

Our first project is a flexible low-cost computer. It provides an ideal environment for experimenting with programming and electronics. The computer is credit-card sized, fanless, starts quickly and consumes at most a few watts of power. It costs 22 pounds/$35 for the Model-B (15 pounds/$25 for Model-A).

Of course there are numerous other applications for a powerful and low-cost computer including helping to close the digital divide. It can also be seen as a simple, open and general-purpose digital building block for incorporating into larger systems, e.g. that need to drive a display, communicate or compute.

Electronics suppliers revel in Raspberry Pi demand (Reuters, 12/3/2012)
Raspberry Pi demand running at '700 per second' (Guardian, 5/3/2012)
Tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer causes big stir on launch day (CNN, 2/3/2012)

Forthcoming Events

24th March - Cambridge Science Festival, try out a Raspberry Pi
25th March - Eben Upton talks at Beeb@30 event in Cambridge
21st April - Idea Transform (Jack Lang)
26th April - Women@CL lunch
15th May - BASDA Software Thought Leaders' Summit (Robert Mullins)
23rd May - HP Science Lectures - Bristol, UK (Robert Mullins)
30th May - National Digital Conference, Plenary talk (Robert Mullins)
15th June - Computing At School Conference (Alan Mycroft)
14th Nov - Digital Learning Conference
4th Dec - Independent Schools' Council ICT Conference